Sunday, November 08, 2009

another fabulous week at the irish times

SEVEN DAYS OF THE GOMDORS.The past seven days have presented us with perhaps the most magnificent period of malign incompetence in the whole 150 year history of the Irish Times.And that's saying something.On Day One: The Irish Times reported that the recession was over. In a pro Obama propaganda piece, masquerading as reportage, the paper claimed new economic indicators showed the American downturn was lifting. The recession had come to an end alleged the geniuses of the Irish Times. Finished. Kaputt. Roll on the broad sunlit uplands. This most arrant falsehood was presented on the newspaper's cover. The Irish Times claimed that recently released statistics proved President Barack Obama had succcessfully ended the recession through his massive billion dollar bailouts to banks and car companies. The statistics quoted were in fact merely representative of the effect on a corrupt bank's balance sheet of a hundred billion dollars of free money. This Irish Times attempt to cheerlead Obama out of the recession was mired in its own cretinism almost immediately as unemployment levels across America and the free world continued to sky rocket. Unemployment this week went above ten percent in America. France and Italy both claim something around seven percent. I gotta tell you folks. I know lots of Italians. None of em have jobs in Italy. My assessment is that the real unemployment figure in Italy is closer to twenty percent. I wonder how many other countries are arrantly falsifying their unemployment rates. Memo to the Irish Times: Er, planet earth calling socialists, are you sure the recession is over?On Day Two: The Irish Times published a cartoon by Martin Turner unfairly callumniating the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the American President Barack Obama as being responsible for the continuance of bloodshed in Afghanistan. Ah yes. If only the Brits and the Yanks would leave Afghanistan, that country could once more be a beacon of prosperous progressive Taliban Al Qaeda civilisation. Brilliant insight there by the Irish Times. Such an astonishingly vile piece of Islamist propaganda in the pages of the Irish Times did not come as a surprise to me. Several years ago Martin Turner's major claim to fame was that he had called for the Bible to be banned.On Day Three: The Irish Times published a photograph of the newly elected governor of New Jersey. The man is a Republican. The Irish Times deliberately published a photo of him designed to make him look paraplegic. It is the singlemost offensive thing I have encountered in thirty years of both monitoring and causing offence. The new Republican governor is a true hero who has defied the Mafia and secured convictions in over a hundred anti corruption cases that he has prosecuted. His main crime, as far as the Irish Times is concerned, is that he has beaten Barack Obama's candidate in a State that was considered unwinnable for Republicans due to the Mafia's gerrymandering of the electoral rolls in favour of Barack Obama. The dead vote in New Jersey. As do non existent members of ethnic minorities. As do dead non existent members of ethnic minorities. But the new Republican governor was elected on a landslide of popular support as ordinary people defied the Mafia hijackers who have so often in the past manipulated their State into the Democratic Party camp. And the Irish Times punishment for the victorious Republican governor of New Jersey, their punishment for a man who dared to show Barack Obama no longer has broad popular support, their contemptible, crass and malign punishment was to print a picture of him looking handicapped. The photo shows his tongue lolling out. The camera angle is tilted upwards so as to ridiculously exaggerate the new Governor's chin. There is a purple stain visible on the Governor's tongue which looks as though it has been highlighted using a photoshop computer programme. His eyes are wide and protuberant. I gotta tell you folks. I watched the Governor speaking on the night this photo was taken. The photographer had clearly worked miracles to produce such a false and unrepresentative image of him. Could I be wrong about this? Clearly the photo is of the Governor. But equally clearly it has been manipulated to make him look retarded. If I am wrong, perhaps the Irish Times would care to explain why they published it.On Day Four: The Irish Times published an article by a certain Kathy Sheridan. Kathy Sheridan up until recently was billed as The Irish Times Journalist Of The Year. The Irish Times stopped giving her this billing after I pointed out that she had said on national television that she thought it was a shame Sean Fitzpatrick should suffer amid the present banking scandals in Ireland, because she knew Sean Fitzpatrick and considered Sean Fitzpatrick a decent man. Sean Fitzpatrick was the chief of Anglo Irish Bank responsible for fraudulently concealing that bank's collapse with the aid of corrupt billion dollar transfers from the corrupt Irish Life And Permanent company whose Board chief is Gillian Bowler. These people and their board members should all be in jail. But I digress. Anglo Irish Bank is still in business because our corrupt kleptocratic Fianna Fail government compelled the Irish people to buy the bank as it collapsed. It was not a sound purchase. Anglo Irish Bank is a midden heap of corruption. There's nothing there to buy. Fianna Fail are bankrupting the country for a lost cause. Bailing out their friends in the banks. But I digress again. Kathy Sheridan, now no longer the Irish Times Journalist Of The Year, was this week reviewing the launch of four books. The books were launched jointly because each focusses on matters relating to the collapse of the Irish economy. The Irish economy has collapsed by the way. Some are still insulated from the collapse. State Sector employees, teachers, nurses, police, soldiers, and bus drivers, all those who marched in Dublin this week in protest at any potential cutbacks in their salaries, those same people are the only ones who are not in recession. They still have the same money they always had. Fianna Fail is still borrowing money and miring the country ever deeper in debt in order to pay their vastly inflated wages. The rest of the country already knows we're in a state of collapse. But I digress yet again, and for the last time. Kathy Sheridan begins her review of the four joint book launches by saying that she found it strange such a big crowd had turned up as none of the books has been written by a celebrity. This was not good journalism by the Irish Times former Journalist Of The Year. One of the books was written by Shane Ross, who is a Senator as well as being business editor with the horrendous anti Catholic Sunday Independent, as well as being a regular guest and presenter on Irish national television. In the Irish sense of the word, Shane Ross is indubitably a celebrity. Odious. Tony O'Reilly worshipping. But still a celebrity. Another of the books was written by Fintan O'Toole. Fintan O'Toole has for thirty years made a living as an oleaginous Marxian champagne socialist feature writer with the horrendous anti Catholic Irish Times as well as presenting programmes on national television, as well as writing the occasional unreadable book, as well as working with the Abbey Theatre as some sort of moral gauleiter to prevent that hugely subsidised and unwatchable theatre company from ever inadvertently saying anything even remotely favourable about Christianity. Fintan O'Toole, may God forgive me, is also most assuredly what passes for a celebrity in Ireland. The other two writers who were launching books on the night were equally entitled to the epithet celebrities. But I couldn't be arsed enumerating their low rent claims to fame. So a good start by Kathy Sheridan. She says the books were written by four non celebrities when in fact they were written by four celebrities. I mean, how wrong can you be? Now here's the rub. Kathy Sheridan reports that Fintan O'Toole stated on the night of the launch that the Irish Time had not been remiss in failing to properly critique the banks and property companies. She reports straight faced Fintan O'Toole's boorish lie that the Irish Times had actually printed articles warning about the dangers of the property boom. Ah Fintan it is a lie. It's so utterly unrepresentative of what the Irish Times did during the supposed boom years, that it amounts to a most invidious lie. As does the pretence by Mr Shane Ross that he and his newspaper are not up to their necks in the speculative rubbish that led Irish people to believe our economy was soundly run. Here is the news. Both the Irish Times and Independent Newspapers made millions from the property speculators, and auctioneers and banks and politicians and Health Boards who placed ads in the pages of their business sections. Both the Irish Times and Independent Newspapers were incapable of telling Irish people that the integrity of the banks in particular and the integrity of Stock Exchange companies generally had been completely shattered by the practice among board members and chief executives at Banks and Stock Exchange companies of giving themselves huge salaries, in effect free money, in effect a life time's wages annually, in effect for doing no work, as they were declaring profits based on accountancy tricks and awarding themselves stratospheric bonuses every time a deal went through, thereby giving themselves massive bonuses for doing a job they were already being excessively remunerated to do, and neither the Irish Times nor Independent Newspapers ever so much as hinted at this simply because both the Irish Times and Independent Newspapers were cleaning up on advertising from these loutish criminal banking Stock Exchange company miscreants. Both the Irish Times and Independent Newspapers played a key role in convincing Irish people that our country was a "Celtic Tiger." They did this ten years ago at precisely the same time I was writing in the Leinster Leader attempting to warn the people of Ireland that Irish economic prosperity was built on a myth, that our employment was excessively concentrated in the overpaid trade unionised State Sector, and that the entire Celtic Tiger concept was worse than a myth or a lie, that it was a nonsense. Even though Mick Sneeran censored my more telling indictments of the banks and the stock exchange companies and the borrowing prone corrupt kleptocratic Fianna Fail government, even so, the cat was out of the bag. There was no Celtic Tiger. If a poet writing for the then okay but now abysmal Johnston Press owned Leinster Leader knew it, why there was no possible excuse for anyone else making a living in financial journalism not to know it. They all knew. None of em said it, that's all. Because the banks and stock exchange companies had bought em all off with advertising. Our national debt was going through the roof, while cops and nursies extorted silly money wages from bent politicians. I wrote this at the time. I wrote this in the silly little now defunct Leinster Leader. When I did, Fianna Fail immediately released figures suggesting the national debt was in fact falling. This silenced me at first. There was no way I could refute those figures. It was a few years later before it emerged that Fianna Fail had paid down part of the national debt using money that had been earmarked for pensions. And now there was a black hole in our pension funds. By then Mick Sneeran had taken me off the financial column and given it to Henry Bauress to write. Henry, a decent fellow, socialistically inclined, not very insightful and with negligible intellect, had killed the thing deader than the dodo within a few months. Ah memories. You couldn't make it up. So here we are. The present day. Kathy Sheridan telling us what wonderful fellows her book writing colleagues are. Right up there with Sean Fitzpatrick no doubt. Let me this way put it. For Shane Ross or Fintan O'Toole or even the other two half baked celebrity twits whose names I couldn't be bothered remembering, for any of them to present themselves as analysts of our present malaise and then to seek to exonerate their own newspapers or media groups from blame, is to fly in the face of natural justice. They were all a part of what went wrong. They all profited from the lie that was the Celtic Tiger. Some of em were more than a little bit responsible for inventing the lie. And there are limits to my patience. Well done Kathy Sheridan. Keep up the good work. I fully expect the Irish Times to start a campaign to have you made Pope if you maintain your present success rate.On Day Five: The Irish Times ran an article on Page One by its anti Catholic religious correspondent Patsy McGarry claiming a sex abuse report into the Catholic Church may take years. So that's the next phase of their persecution. Those who are using sex abuse as a tool in their efforts to annihilate the church now have a new strategy. They will keep announcing newer and ever more prolonged sex abuse enquiries relating to the Catholic church while holding no enquiries into the vast preponderance of sex abuse cases which do not involve the Catholic church. Ingenious, isn't it. They're all but ignoring the huge levels of sex abuse, murder and sacrifice to satan, currently taking place in our society. Currently. Right this moment. Funny that there's been no extended enquiries and media outrage into the violations by Doctors Michael Neary of hundreds of women on the operating table at Drogheda Hopital. No extended enquiries and media outrage into the abuse of young boys by Doctor Michael Shine at Drogheda Hospital. (On the odd occasions when it mentions these cases, Independent Newspapes always refers to Drogheda Hospital as Our Lady Of Lourdes Hospital. Think of the inuendo they can convey with the name. But of course for decades the hospital has been to all intents and purposes run by a secular Health Board.) No extended enquiries and media outrage about Nurse Mulholland's murders at Naas Hospital. No extended enquiries and media outrage into the twenty children believed to have been murdered in Health Board care over the past few years. Believed to have been murdered. The kids are dead anyway. But the Health Board is not to be held accountable for the behaviour of any of its employees. No need for public outrage there. Just a body count. No extended enquiries or public outrage into the dozens of people being found dead in the basements of poliice stations. Who cares about them? They're not a scandal. I'm alright Jack. But I'd advise you not to get detained by the Irish police force for any reason. And whatever the hell you do, don't go down the basement. Because sometimes you won't come back alive. We have lots of scandals in Ireland. But only a few of them are of interest to the Irish Times. The public outrage standard seems to be applied only when the abuser is a member of the church. Hoo boy. Tell me. Is outrage something that the Irish Times merely feigns in order to attack the Catholic Church? Of course it is.Day Six: The Irish Times gave prominence on its World News page to an article by Lara Marlowe about the murders at Fort Hood. In a tissue of sublimest Islamist appeasement, Lara Marlowe disrespects the dead and exonerates the Al Qaeda Muslim murderer who killed them. She suggests Fox News had somehow behaved inappropriately by asking had the murderer been let into the military for reasons of political correctness. It's a reasonable question. Not really right wing conspiracy stuff surely. I didn't hear it asked on Fox and I have my doubts it was asked. In any case my opinion of Fox News is that generally speaking they were as anodyne and cautious as CNN on the night of the slaughter. I watched hours of Fox News coverage. There was no outrage expressed towards Muslims. There was no right wing stuff, much to my dismay. Marlowe's charge is unfair and untrue. You know folks we really needed some outrage on the night of the murders. We really need some now. The Muslims are playing the victim game and we're letting them away with it. Contrary to what Lara Marlowe says, we had Fox News presenting the murderer's family members live on air complaining that their boy had been bullied by the men he'd just murdered. Marlowe doesn't mention this piece of reportage at all. She does favour us with her own theory. She publishes suicide figures at Fort Hood over the past six years, deliberately implying that these may indicate a possible reason for the massacre. Now that's what I call an obscenity. Ah yes. Someone tell Lara Marlowe the difference between committing suicide and shooting thirteen people dead in cold blood. This was a Muslim attack on the free world. And it's time to send them home. Right wing enough for you Marlowe. You useless Nazi bitch.On the seventh day: They rested.